The marginalization of Monica Rodriguez
One councilmember's war on every Council President runs into a setback
LA City Council committee assignments have arrived. The moment when the private vendettas that define much of daily life in City Hall burble up to the surface — the burbling is upon us.
The committees work like this: Council motions have to pass through a committee before it goes in front of the full body for a vote. Transportation Committee reviews transportation-related legislation, and so on. Every City Councilmember sits on five committees and chairs one. The chair decides what does and doesn’t get agendized in their committee. They can even waive stuff out of committee and send it straight to the Council floor if they want.
Some committees are considered reservoirs of power and influence, like Budget or Planning & Land Use Management. Others are whammys. And all of the seats are chosen by the Council President. That’s a big reason why the Council President is one of the two most powerful people in LA city government: they can wield committee slots to reward allies and punish nemeses. Current President Marqueece Harris-Dawson (South LA, center-left) did quite a bit of both this week.
David Zahniser at the LA Times covered most of the big turns:
Katy Yaroslavsky (West LA, center-left wing) took over as chair of the powerful Budget committee, replacing Bob Blumenfield (West Valley, center-center wing). Blumenfield had previously made a run for Council President against Harris-Dawson and hassled the Mayor about funding for her Inside Safe program when he was Budget chair, but he’s now chair of Planning and Land Use Management, still a prominent seat. Traci Park (the beach, conservative wing) was also removed from Budget after being placed on it earlier this year.
Eunisses Hernandez (Eastside, progressive wing) also got a seat on Budget, a position she had sought since getting elected, and was made co-chair of a new Ad Hoc Committee on Public Safety Reform, her primary policy interest.
John Lee (Northwest Valley, conservative wing) took over as chair of Public Safety Committee, which mainly handles issues related police and fire. Lee was basically the swing vote who secured Harris-Dawson the Council Presidency, and Public Safety was the committee Lee wanted.
But there’s no debating who got the short end this time around. Harris-Dawson removed Monica Rodriguez (Northeast Valley, conservative wing), one of the longest-serving members of the Council, from the Budget and Housing & Homelessness committees as well as Public Safety, of which she’d been chair for almost seven full years — by far the longest unbroken stretch running a committee for any current Councilmember. She sounded pretty irked about it all in her statement to the LA Times.
Asked about her removal from so many committees, Rodriguez issued a statement questioning whether Harris-Dawson values a decision-making process that “respects taxpayer dollars.”
You could argue that this was a brazen act of disrespect against a senior elected official, or that it was a long time coming. Rodriguez has been the Councilmember most adversarial to Council leadership for years, no matter who the leader has been. This check on her power seems to answer a question about how long you can get what you want while antagonizing the people in charge of giving it out.
Rodriguez is alternative in both spirit and taste. She loves ska, new wave, punk, ska punk, post-punk, and probably many other punks. Among her happiest moments in office are the times when she gets to meet and honor her favorite artists by naming a day after them. Here she is with Morrissey celebrating Morrissey Day.
“I didn’t honor him for his politics,” she said in an interview later.
Rodriguez is also maybe the third most conservative Councilmember and represents one of the two most conservative districts, a majority-Latino, majority-homeowner corner of the Northeast Valley that Rick Caruso won by 15 points (although Rodriguez did not endorse Caruso or Bass in 2022).
Her main status symbol on the Council was her Public Safety Committee chairwomanship, a position fraught with risk and opportunity. If a Public Safety Committee chair aligns herself with the interests of the police and fire unions, she can benefit from their generous outside spending for the rest of her career. But if she crosses them, she can find yourself facing existential political threats — like Rodriguez did in the Summer of 2020, after the Council and the Mayor responded to mass protests by agreeing to cut $150 million from the LAPD budget.
Two days after that decision was announced, Rodriguez was summoned to a dimly lit police station parking garage in Panorama City. There she was surrounded by uniformed officers, some with their backs turned, while a police union director berated her for “bowing down to Black Lives Matter.”
“I promise you, this union will go to our grave fighting. ... We’re gonna fight,” said Jerretta Sandoz, a board member with the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
They ended up putting billboards with Rodriguez’s face next to violent crime numbers around her district.
Rodriguez remained a reliable ally for the union on salary increases and most of their other priority issues, but the relationship never fully healed. The LAPPL didn’t even endorse Rodriguez in her 2022 re-election campaign (the race wasn’t competitive anyway).
Still, Rodriguez held on to her committee chair throughout and beyond this moment of precarity. Even more impressively, she managed to keep it while sharpening herself into the main thorn in the side of the last three Council Presidents.
When Nury Martinez ran the Council, she and Rodriguez were for a time the only two women on the 15-member body, but their mutual dislike for each other was widely known (a dynamic dating back to the early nineties, when they went to San Fernando High at the same time). After Martinez was publicly disgraced in the Fed Tapes scandal, Rodriguez landed the last shot by putting forward the motion to remove her from the Presidency.
Rodriguez then threw her support behind Curren Price to take over as President — maybe because Price’s competition for the job was Paul Krekorian, and Rodriguez was not friendly with Krekorian’s office. Krekorian’s longtime Chief of Staff, Karo Torossian, had run against Rodriguez in her 2017 campaign — a very ugly contest that left both of them nursing a grudge.
But Krekorian managed to rally the rest of the Council around him, and went into the day of the final Council President vote with a clear path to victory. Undeterred, Rodriguez put forward a motion to delay the vote by a week, and when nobody seconded it she bailed on the meeting entirely.
Krekorian and his close ally Bob Blumenfield dished about it during the meeting in these texts that reporter Jon Peltz got from a public records request.
But sheesh.
Cut ahead two years: Krekorian is termed out, and Marqueece Harris-Dawson whips together enough support to take over the Presidency. Rodriguez no-shows for that vote too. And since then, while she has never been shy about making critical remarks in Council meetings, she’s ladled on some extra sauce about Harris-Dawson’s management.
Things came to a head two weeks ago during a high-stakes meeting for Harris-Dawson. The Council was debating a minimum wage increase for tourism workers in the leadup to the Olympics — the vote had already been pushed once when a consensus couldn’t be reached. Rodriguez had unsuccessfully been pushing amendments to improve the deal for hotel owners, and as the process was winding down, she stood up and accused Harris-Dawson of having made a “backroom deal” and called the process that he’d had overseen “a mess, but by design.”
You wonder if Rodriguez had already made an educated guess that she was going to lose her committees when she made this speech. For more than a year she’s been one of LA’s most visible critics of Mayor Bass’s signature homeless sheltering and rehousing program, Inside Safe — she calls it too expensive and not accountable to the Council enough. So she might have anticipated that Harris-Dawson, Mayor Bass’s very close ally, would remove her from the two committees she sat on with the most oversight of Inside Safe, and she may have known that John Lee wanted the Public Safety chair. Maybe her words for Harris-Dawson were a preemptive clapback. Maybe a signal that she’ll say whatever she wants no matter what committees she’s on.
Anyway. This isn’t the end of the Monica Rodriguez story. She has a final term she can run for in two years, but she’s widely believed to be exploring a run for citywide office. That office could be Mayor in 2030, or even sooner if Bass starts looking more vulnerable. But most people seem to think she’s going to run for Controller in 2026, when she’d have to go up against incumbent Kenneth Mejia. The committee she’s now chairing, a brand new one called “Government Efficiency, Innovation, and Audits,” would seem to offer her some reps in a Controller-type role.
For those interested, here are all the committee assignments.
A DEPUTY MAYOR IS ACCUSED OF CALLING IN A BOMB THREAT TO CITY HALL
That’s more or less the story right now. Brian K. Williams, who’s worked in city and county government for years but most recently as Karen Bass’s Deputy Mayor of Public Safety, got his Pasadena home raided by the FBI last week under suspicion of calling in a bomb threat on City Hall in October.
LAPD investigators had found Williams to be the “likely” source of the threat and referred the case to the feds. Williams, through his lawyer, is proclaiming his innocence.
I’m only bringing up this bizarre story because I have no idea whatsoever what happened here and nobody I’ve talked to does either. This quote from the LA Times article is the kind of thing people are saying:
“If I had been asked to come up with a list of 100 people at City Hall who would have done this, he wouldn’t even have been on the list,” said one longtime city official, who declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the investigation.
Sure makes you want to know what’s going on!
SHADY IN ARCADIA
Federal prosecutors came down with charges this week against a Chino Hills man named Yaoning “Mike” Sun, accusing him of being an unregistered foreign agent for the Chinese government and working to tarnish the reputation of the anti-CCP religion Falun Gong while operating under the deep cover of “guy who does local politics stuff.”
The criminal complaint contains many text exchanges where Sun and his supervisor frantically work on reports for their party bosses on what a great job they’re doing at influencing Southern California local government. They all use some great emojis, especially this one:
They also brag about their connections to local elected officials, including a former LA County Supervisor who certainly appears to have the same initials as former LA County Supervisor Mike Antonovich. Like many of us, they are bewildered by LA County’s governance structure:
Sun, the accused Chino Hills agent, is alleged to have been working on China’s behalf when he ran a winning campaign for a “Southern California City Councilmember,” who has since been named in multiple news outlets as Eileen Wang from Arcadia and turns out to also be Sun’s fiancee. Coincidentally, Wang was just featured in an LAT story from earlier this month about the shift to Donald Trump in Arcadia (Wang says in the story that she voted for Harris).
The headlines sound like we’re talking about high-stakes international espionage, but to me the criminal complaint reads like remote workers who did jack shit the whole quarter and suddenly need to hype up some accomplishments for their long-distance boss. If anyone from the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party is reading this: you did not get your money’s worth. Arcadia is a city of 55,000 people — 1/600th the size of Chongqing. The “new political star” these guys were telling you about got twelve hundred votes. One of the only articles I can find on the Arcadia City Council is about a tree controversy. I’m not sure that this woman was likely to play a meaningful role in undermining Taiwanese independence.
In another delightful report to their party superiors, the alleged foreign agents also made a list of the “five major parades in the United States each year” and included the Hollywood Christmas Parade at number four.
No disrespect to the Hollywood Christmas Parade but this is more faulty intel — this parade is not even in the top ten major parade discussion. Willing to hear arguments but Dean Cain was one of the hosts this year.
Meanwhile over at Falun Gong, their American media arm The Epoch Times is booking one big-shot California Democrat after another on their California Insider web show. State Senator Maria Elena Durazo just did a forty-minute interview! Again, apologies to the CCP but you might need to step your game up over here. But thank you for believing that working on City Council campaigns in Southern California is a high-status, socially influential job and please get that message to my family.
Have a lovely holiday week from all of us here at Big City Heat.